The Perennial Philosophy
"Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eternity
of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration;
and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own
animal dharma, or immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the
instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives
nostalgically, apprehensively, and hopefully in the past and future as well as in
the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on personal
cleverness, rather than on inspiration from the divine Nature of Things; finds
himself in a condition of chronic civil war between passion and prudence and, on
a higher level of awareness and ethical sensibility, between egotism and
dawning spirituality. But this "wearisome condition of humanity" is the
indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and deliverance. Man must live in
time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on
the spiritual level; he must be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to
be able consciously to transcend separate self-hood; he must do battle with the
lower self in order that he may become identified with that high Self within him,
which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his
cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth,
the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Gound. Reason and its works
"are not and cannot be a proximate means of union with God." The proximate
means is "intellect," in the scholastic sense of the word, or spirit. In the last
analysis the use and purpose of reason is to create the internal and external
conditions favourable to its own transfiguration by and into spirit. It is the lamp
by which it finds the way to go beyond itself."
"The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of
discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly
experienced and realized by the human beings. This Absolute is the
God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of
man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine
Ground - the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to "die
to self" and so make room, as it were for God. Out of any given generation of
man and women very few will achieve the final end of human existence; but the
opportunity for coming to unitive knowledge will, in one way or another,
continually be offered until all sentient beings realize Who in fact they are."
"The Greeks believed that hubris was always followed by nemesis, that if you
went too far you would get a knock on the head to remind you that the gods
will not tolerate insolence on the part of mortal men. In the sphere of human
relations, the modern mind understands the doctrine of hubris and regards it as
mainly true. We wish pride to have a fall, and we see that very often it does fall.
To have too much power over one's fellows, to be too rich, too violent, too
ambitious - all this invites punishment, and in the long run, we notice
punishment of one sort or another duly comes. But the Greeks did not stop
there. Because they regarded Nature as in some way divine, they felt that it had
to be respected and they were convinced that a hubristic lack of respect of
Nature would be punished by avenging nemesis."
"Deliverance is out of time into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and
docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order
that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously
in a "state of grace." All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to
making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine
Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian haps, endowed with the power either to
expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.
In every exposition of the Perennial Philosophy the human soul is regarded as
feminine in relation to the Godhead, the personal God and even the Order of
Nature. Hubris, which is the original sin, consists in regarding the personal ego
as self-sufficiently masculine in relation to the Spirit within and to Nature
without, and in behaving accordingly."
The Doors of Perception/Heaven & Hell
"Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent
Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to
consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the
type of theory with Bergson put forward in connection with memory and
sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and
nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not
productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that
has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening
everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system
is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we
should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only
that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But
in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make
biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the
reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the
other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us
stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express
the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly
elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call
languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the
linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch
as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's
experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced
awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so
that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual
things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the
universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified, by
language."